Stop the Clock (2 page)

‘Maybe not, but you can love your job, and that’s worth something,’ Tina said, feeling impelled to defend, not just her ambition, but the other, secret choice she had made. ‘Marriage and babies isn’t the only thing worth having. It can’t be. It’s not the only kind of love. And anyway, you can’t seriously tell me you don’t ever miss
Beautiful Interiors
. You used to be so into that magazine!’

Lucy reached across to take Adam’s hand.

‘I’d much rather make a beautiful home of my own than tell other people what to put in theirs,’ she said. ‘That’s my ten-year plan. I honestly can’t think of any better way to spend the next decade. If we can get this house we’ve found, I’ll have everything I’ve ever wanted.’

‘Yeah, but you are going to go back to work eventually, aren’t you?’ Adam said. ‘To help with the mortgage.’

‘Of course, darling.’

And then Lucy started telling them all about the house she and Adam were trying to buy.

‘We call it the Forever House, because that’s what you call the place you want to live in for the rest of your lives.’

‘It sounds like something out of a fairy-tale,’ Natalie said.

‘For ever is a long time,’ Tina said. ‘If you ask me, ten years seems quite far enough to look ahead.’

After lunch they went for a stroll on the beach, and Adam got the three women to line up for a photo.

‘Just for the record,’ he said as he looked through the viewfinder and fiddled with the focus. ‘Tina, Natalie and Lucy, on the cusp of the new millennium.’

After a while Lottie fell over and refused to toddle any further, and Adam hoisted her on to his shoulders and volunteered to take her back to the house.

‘Let’s all go,’ Tina said. ‘We should stick together. Anyway, it’s starting to get dark.’

The light was beginning to fade. The horizon was a deep band of shadow rather than a fine line between the ocean and the clouds, and as they made their way across the sand a chill breeze blew in from the waves. The final night of a thousand years was already rolling in, and the dark, pressing sky, grey sea and icy breeze seemed to harbour the power of transformation, and to be reminding them that change was imminent, inevitable – and already upon them.

IT WAS TINA’S
fault; that was how Lucy thought of it afterwards. If Tina hadn’t started writing that silly column, it wouldn’t have happened – at least not in the way it did.

But on the morning that Tina’s column was to change Lucy’s life there was no obvious sign that anything unusual was about to happen, though it did take Lucy longer than normal to decide what to wear. When she was ready she looked herself up and down in the full-length mirror next to the marital bed, and wasn’t 100 per cent sure that she liked what she saw.

She had on a long rose-patterned skirt and pink plimsolls – very Boden lady – plus a pink lacy cardigan that knotted under the bust, bought because it looked vaguely artistic, like something a poetess might
wear: she’d been charmed by its impractical prettiness. Now she wondered if it just looked dippy.

Of course, the problem wasn’t really the clothes – it was her. She was trying to look perky and sweet and wholesome, and she just looked . . .
faded
. The only cure was sex, and that had become a rarity. She felt gorgeous when Adam wanted her, and un-gorgeous when he didn’t, which, lately, was far more often than not.

She would have liked to think of herself as a yummy mummy. She’d noticed that women used this as a term of disapprobation, implying criticism of the idleness, vanity and greedy shopping habits that supposedly went with it. But when men described a mother that way, they usually meant they thought she was still sexy.

Lucy had a comfortable lifestyle, a nice house, a family and no job, but was that enough for her to rank as a yummy? Probably not.

There was a stirring of bed linen and Adam heaved himself upright. He had completely overdone it at the fortieth birthday party they’d attended the night before, and she knew he’d be in a foul mood. That was another thing about getting older – hangovers were hell.

‘I don’t know what you’re worrying about,’ Adam said. ‘Natalie’s about to pop. She’s not going to be looking her best.’

‘I’m not worrying,’ Lucy said. ‘I just don’t want her and Tina to think I look old.’

She decided to brush her hair one last time. Still, with the hairdresser’s help, uniformly chestnut brown, it fell to the middle of her back. If she stopped dyeing it, it would probably look eccentric or even witchy. But
Adam had always loved her hair . . . Would there come a time when she’d have to cut it?

‘Would you say I was a yummy mummy?’ she asked him.

‘God, no. No way,’ Adam said.

‘Oh. Thanks a lot.’

‘Well . . . aren’t they meant to be rather vacuous? I mean, you’re much too intelligent.’

He hadn’t meant to insult her, of course not. He just hadn’t understood what she was asking, and she should have realized that he wouldn’t.

It had been a silly question, but she couldn’t explain herself without sounding ridiculously needy. Best Leave It: as useful a motto for marriage as Bless This House.

‘You know, the thing that keeps you young is embracing new experiences,’ Adam said.

Arghh, no! This could only be a veiled reference to the job in Argentina that he’d been offered a couple of months ago. He had been keen to go, but she had talked him out of it. She had no desire to leave her home, and uproot herself and the children.

She turned to smile reassuringly at him.

‘I know it was a tough decision, but we definitely did the right thing staying put,’ she said. ‘If we’d gone overseas we would have been completely isolated and cut off from all our support.’

‘You mean you wouldn’t have Hannah to run round after you.’

Ouch! For a moment all she could do was stare at him. How could he imply that her sister was some kind of downtrodden Cinderella, exploited to provide
domestic help? Hannah lived in the loft conversion virtually rent-free, and all that was expected in return was a little light babysitting. Adam knew as well as she did that now the children were older, the arrangement was much more for Hannah’s benefit than for Lucy’s.

Lucy had
rescued
Hannah. And now they were here, in the Forever House. And here they were going to stay.

Maybe she was beginning to lose her looks, but there was nothing tired or worn about her house. Take this room, for example: it was calm and bright and sweet, with lots of white wood and faded blue toile de Jouy. Not too chintzy, out of deference to Adam’s masculinity.

‘We have to put the girls first, and they’re happy here,’ she said.

‘You can’t pretend that my work and the welfare of this family are two separate entities,’ Adam said. ‘If you want me to carry on bringing home the bacon, you need to support my career.’

His expression was so sulky he suddenly struck her as looking like an aged boy, as if manhood had passed him by and he’d slipped straight from adolescence into the onset of middle-aged decline.

She glared at him. ‘I do support your career – just not at the expense of this family. You think that because you’re the breadwinner and we are your dependants, we have to do what you want.’

‘No, I do not. I mean that what’s good for me is good for all of us.’

Lucy turned her back to him and put the hairbrush
down in its place, next to the perfume he’d bought, together with matching shower gel and body lotion, for her last birthday. He had a knack for buying her presents that she liked – got ideas by flicking through her magazines. Never had to ask her what she wanted, and never got anything tacky. She’d always felt a bit sorry for Natalie, who had to give Richard a list.

Why was this desire for change surfacing now? She didn’t really believe it was frustrated ambition. He worked hard, but he had always treated his career in marketing as a means to an end, a way of paying for the lives they had chosen: her home-making, the family holidays in the Dordogne or the Algarve or Puglia, the ski-ing trips with his buddies.

‘Adam, is everything all right at work?’ she asked, but she never got to hear his answer, because at that moment the bedroom door burst open and Clemmie, their assertive seven-year-old, appeared.

‘Can’t you bloody well learn to knock?’ Adam shouted.

‘Don’t say bloody,’ Clemmie said. ‘Why are you still in bed, Daddy?’

‘I was trying to have a lie-in. I suppose that’s too much to ask for around here.’

‘It probably is time to think about getting up, you know,’ Lucy told Adam. ‘Aren’t you meant to be playing golf today?’

She took Clemmie by the hand, steered her out and let the door shut behind them.

Hannah was standing in the hallway, studying the whiteboard on which the day’s activities were written
up, along with times, addresses and contact numbers.

‘Did you have a nice evening?’ Lucy said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘It was OK,’ Hannah said, with a self-deprecating grimace.

She was taller and thinner than Lucy, with a short crop of hair that right now was sticking up every which way, as if she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. Lucy sometimes felt matronly in comparison, but she reminded herself that Hannah’s gamine attractiveness was at least partly to her credit.

Hannah was a chain-smoking degree dropout whose boyfriends, like her temping assignments, came and went. But since she’d been living with Lucy in Surrey, in an environment that was as villagey as you were likely to find this close to London, she’d lost the malnourished pallor of the city girl who drinks too much and sleeps too little, and had begun to bloom.

Lucy liked to think her children had something to do with that; they loved Hannah – sometimes, Lucy thought as Clemmie dropped her hand and bowled towards her aunt, almost knocking her over in her enthusiasm, a
little
too much.

Clemmie dragged Hannah into the family room, prattling about the game she wanted to play, and Lucy realized she’d have to get a move on if she wanted to get to Natalie’s on time.

Poor old Natalie – Lucy still remembered all too clearly how awful it was getting through those last few weeks in the office, when you were huge and hormonal and bone-tired, and dreading the birth. When she had
finished work to have Lottie, she’d thought, Never again – no way I’m going back. And she hadn’t.

But it was all worth it in the end. She would love to have a third, if only Adam wasn’t so dead set against it. It still wasn’t too late – plenty of women hadn’t even started their families at her age. Why, look at Natalie, just getting going with her first!

It would be such a treat to have a good long cuddle with little Matilda, when she finally arrived. Babies were so
uncomplicated
. Demanding, yes, and sometimes resistant too, but if they didn’t want you to hold them, at least you didn’t have to take it personally.

Natalie’s house always reminded Lucy of the place they’d shared with Tina when they all first moved to London, before Lucy got together with Adam. Natalie now lived in the outskirts of Clapham rather than Brixton, but it was fundamentally the same three-bedroomed Victorian terrace, just better maintained and with the advantage of central heating.

As Lucy rang the doorbell she could hear Tina talking – except Tina didn’t talk so much as deliver. Her voice wasn’t posh, exactly, although it was certainly clear and carrying; it was more actressy? unhurried, almost languorous, with a precise, artfully modulated huskiness. It invited attention rather than demanding it, and then made you conscious of listening.

‘I meant to be tongue in cheek,’ Tina was saying. ‘Some of the comments people have made online have been astonishingly vitriolic. I think “bitter old maid” has been about the most complimentary. Someone even
posted me a turkey baster. Anonymously, of course. But what am I to do? I was told to write something about being single and childless at the age of thirty-five, and that’s what I did. I’m damned if I’m going to go on about how bereft I feel every time I walk past a woman with a pushchair.’

Lucy knocked again, louder this time, and the door opened and Tina stood smiling in front of her.

Not for the first time, Lucy was pained to note that Tina’s sharp, dewy prettiness was almost unmarked by time, and she still had the athletic trimness that follows a girlhood spent riding horses and playing tennis. She could just about have passed for a woman at the end of her twenties.

They embraced, and Lucy said, ‘Why on earth did someone post you a turkey baster?’

‘Because of this!’ Natalie said, appearing in the hallway and brandishing a copy of the
Post
.

She looked enormous and swollen, but nevertheless brighter and more cheerful than Lucy had anticipated. They greeted slightly awkwardly – Natalie wasn’t a fluent air-kisser, and her belly was a considerable obstacle.

Lucy handed over a pot of her home-grown hyacinths, and as Natalie and Tina admired them and praised her gardening know-how she said, ‘Oh, I made these as well,’ and fished a Tupperware box of freshly baked brownies out of her basket and passed that to Natalie too.

‘You are the domestic goddess,’ Tina said.

‘The girls helped,’ Lucy said, which wasn’t strictly
true – they’d only shown an interest once the baking tray came out of the oven.

Then she reached out to take the
Post
from Natalie.

The first thing she saw was the name: Tina Fox, writ large. Next to it was a byline photo, in which Tina looked suitably foxy? sharp and sultry at the same time. She was smiling, but the effect was unnerving rather than friendly, as if she’d just spotted something live and edible, and was about to go for its neck.

There were a couple of hundred words of text, topped by the title of the column: ‘The Vixen Letters’.

Lucy immediately had to suppress a stab of jealousy. It was quite unreasonable to mind that Tina had achieved this new success in a field she had long since abandoned.

‘Wow! That’s amazing – is this a regular column? Tina, why didn’t you say anything?’